nach oben

Open Access 2025 | Open Access | Buch

The Republic of Turkey and its Unresolved Issues

100 Years and Beyond

herausgegeben von: Pınar Dinç, Olga Selin Hünler

Verlag: Springer Nature Singapore

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

This open access book explores the Republic of Turkey’s unresolved issues that have persisted over the past 101 years. It adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the challenges facing the country to critically analyse the broader historical, political, economic, social and psychological dimensions that intersect with these challenges. It offers a rich and nuanced understanding of Turkey’s complex history and contemporary issues, covering topics that have often been undermined or silenced, including but not limited to the Armenian and Dersim genocides, xeno-racism, feminist approaches to sexual morality, queer resistances, environmental movements, and the right to the city.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

PDF

Open Access

Chapter 1. Introduction by the Editors

Abstract

In its first hundred years, the Republic of Turkey has not only failed to address its longstanding issues but has also faced new social, political, economic, and cultural challenges. Acknowledging both continuities and changes between the “old” and “new” Turkey, this book seeks to provide an alternative interpretation of the republic’s first century, focusing on overlooked and marginalised perspectives. Adopting a thematic rather than chronological approach, the book is divided into four sections, each addressing different facets of the republic’s foundational problems. In the first part, we search for an answer to a very central question: who owns the Republic of Turkey? Part II focuses on understanding how we remember the past and how this changing memory regime(s) shape (re-)imagining the future by exploring how memory is remembered, fractured, and included in the claims for transitional justice and within various social and political movements. Part III centres on resistance, exploring a range of examples, from physical spaces of political and social activism to digital struggles. Part IV focuses on the key structural problems of the republic. These interconnected chapters offer insight into how these unresolved issues will continue to shape Turkey's trajectory in its second century. As such, the issues highlighted and emphasised in this book represent only a fraction of a much longer list that needs to be tackled, not only in the context of the past but also in relation to ongoing realities.

Pınar Dinç, Olga Selin Hünler

PDF Zum Volltext

Who Owns the Republic of Turkey?

Frontmatter

Open Access

Chapter 2. Turkish Supremacy and Its Discontents: Minorities and Majorities in the Turkish Republic

Abstract

This chapter analyses the Turkish Republic as an ethnocratic regime, exploring the political and discursive frameworks that have shaped minority policies over the past century. It argues that the boundaries of “Turkishness”—defined by both ethnic and religious criteria—have dictated the state’s selective inclusion and exclusion of non-Muslim and non-Turkish Muslim communities. By examining state policies and societal interactions with these groups, the chapter reveals the dynamics of power and exclusion that underlie Turkey’s nation-building project(s). It also highlights how race, class, and gender intersect with these exclusionary practices. While focused on Turkey, the chapter’s insights are relevant to other nation-states, such as Germany and Israel, where historical and ongoing processes of ethnic and religious exclusion, and a past or present genocide, unsettle the self-narratives of democracy and inclusivity.

Kerem Öktem

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 3. Crime and Non-punishment: Legacies of Genocide and Denial in Turkey

Abstract

The Armenian genocide and its denial is the element by which one can best define the “spirit” of the Republic of Turkey. The living and permanent spectre of a terrible crime against humanity, and the fact that the perpetrators went unpunished (that they “got away with it”), shaped the future role of communities as a code of (un)ethics in society. In this framework, the Muslim Turks re-established their status as the “ruling nation” (colonisers) of the country, while the “indigenous peoples”—Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others—were massacred, expelled from their homes, forced to leave the country, dispossessed of their property, or remained as unequal and unwanted citizens of the new republic, constantly victimised by denial. This chapter discusses how the last hundred years of post-genocide republican history are full of re-enacted moments of structural violence against non-Muslims and non-Turks, both in deceptively peaceful times and when routine relations break down during massacres and pogroms. In four subsections—the hostage situation, dystopic state surveillance, palimpsests of violence, and anticipated catastrophe—the chapter addresses the legacies of genocide and denial in Turkish Republican history through a non-exhaustive overview of both historical and contemporary cases.

Nazan Maksudyan

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 4. Dersim: A Century of State-Led Destruction and Resistance

Abstract

What happened in Dersim in 1937–38, in the early years of the Turkish Republic, is no longer a secret. In recent decades, Dersim has been recognised as at least a state-led “massacre”, mass graves have been discovered, and written and oral testimonies of both victims and perpetrators have come to light. However, a clear definition and recognition of this genocide, as well as reconciliation and restorative justice initiatives, are still missing. Moreover, Dersim remained a zone of conflict and destruction in the following decades, especially in the early 1990s and after the collapse of the Kurdish peace process in 2015. Against this backdrop, this chapter delves into the history of Dersim in the first 100 years of modern Turkey to expose the continuities of state-led destruction and discusses the future of this resilient part of Turkey in its second century.

Pınar Dinç

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 5. The Scholarly Subject of the “Kurdish Question”: Knowledge, Resilience and Gender

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the academic production of counter-hegemonic knowledge about Kurdish lives in Turkey through the dual lenses of resilience and gender politics. Against the common scholarly tendency to identify the exilic roots of the Kurdish question, I reterritorialise the Kurdish question through an examination of the experiences of three contemporary writers and thinkers: İsmail Beşikçi, Mesut Yeğen and Handan Çağlayan. Certain seminal works published between 1991 and 2007 by Beşikçi, Yeğen and Çağlayan coincide with many overlapping, translocal crises: ethnic violence, forced migration and mass population movements. I propose rethinking the epistemologies of Kurdish lives through a repositioned lens: through a critical re-reading of the back-and-forth between crisis and corresponding, academic, emergent publics in the trace of a non-masculine subject of the Kurdish question.

Bahar Şimşek

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 6. Transnational Alevism: Shaping Identity, Community and Recognition Across Borders

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Alevis and Alevism in a transnational context, exploring the factors driving international migration, its consequences for Alevis worldwide and its connection with the Alevi claim for legitimacy and recognition. Migration and diaspora serve as a lens to understand the transnational scope of the ongoing Alevi struggle for recognition, which is one of the most important unsolved problems of the republican era. Their claim emphasises equal citizenship and religious freedom that concentrated on the acknowledgement of cemevi as the Alevi worshipping place, together with the removal of compulsory Islamic education classes (that exclude Alevism) for Alevi children. Despite being the second-largest religious group in Turkey, Alevis lived for centuries under oppression, marginalisation and exclusion. These experiences have significantly influenced Alevi identity politics and motivated them to actively seek recognition and visibility, particularly in Western countries with robust religious freedom protections. Migration has transformed Alevis into a diaspora community with the freedom to openly practise their rituals. They have experienced significant community growth, which has increased their activism both nationally and transnationally and gained official recognition at various degrees. However, while such developments shifted in European countries, where Alevism has been taught in schools, the struggle for official recognition remains an unsettled issue in Turkey. The chapter discusses the struggle for recognition in Turkey and its shift with the development of transnational Alevi activism. Considering the Alevi historical context, migration and diaspora experience, and the claim for recognition together helps us understand not only the unresolved tensions and challenges within Turkey’s complex sociopolitical landscape but also the broader themes of minority and migrant rights, citizenship and transnational solidarity in an increasingly interconnected world.

Hayal Hanoğlu

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 7. The Rise of Xeno-Racism in Turkey: The Transformation of Racism in the Context of Migration

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how racism has been shaped in the context of migration flows in the Turkish Republic as one of the legacies of the new century, as its first century ends and moves into the second. Contrary to the widespread belief that “There is no racism in Turkey” since the emergence of modern Turkey as a nation-state, racism against non-Muslims and Kurds that are perceived as external to the polity has persisted. Xenophobia is a more recent phenomenon, linked to the influx of Syrians in the 2010s, yet its target is not limited to Syrians. A dangerous amalgamation of racism and xenophobia has emerged in a new form as xeno-racism, which manifests itself in a cluster of intersectionality directed at refugees. This study examines the rapid rise of xenophobia through its manifestations in pogroms as the most extreme forms of violence.

Lülüfer Körükmez

PDF Zum Volltext

Remembering the Past, (Re-)imagining the Future

Frontmatter

Open Access

Chapter 8. Fractures in Dominant Republican Memory: The 2000s, the Memory Turn and Memory Activism in Turkey

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the changing memory landscape of Turkey after the 2000s. It discusses the robust and multifaceted political struggle for memory that emerged during this period and how it opened breaches in the national narrative. The chapter provides a historical background of the salient phases and junctures of memory politics in Turkey and discusses the monolithic, exclusionary, denial-based memory regime that existed until the 1980s. I argue that the 1980s marked a radical political and cultural transformation in Turkey, which also impacted social remembering. The erosion of the monolithic narrative of the nation in the 1980s and the accumulation created by social movements since the 1980s led to the struggle for memory that gained strength in the 2000s. Turkey’s monolithic and exclusionary memory regime had a potential fragility, and by the 2000s, it became possible to speak of a vibrant and dynamic political memory struggle that could create erosions in this fragile memory regime. The chapter provides a landscape of memory struggle in Turkey and indicates multiple fields and collective agents involved in memory activism. It concludes that the decades under discussion only refer to the primary actions and imaginings of the memory turn in Turkey and that the struggle for memory in Turkey will progress in a way that promotes diversity and further erodes monolithic narratives.

Göze Orhon

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 9. Confronting the Shadows: Transitional Justice and the Armenian Genocide in Turkey

Abstract

This chapter examines the Armenian Genocide through the framework of transitional justice, with a particular focus on truth recovery mechanisms. Despite substantial historical evidence, the Republic of Turkey has persistently denied the Genocide, engaging in state-sponsored efforts to minimise and rationalise the atrocities. This denial has hindered reconciliation and reflects complex historical and political dynamics. Addressing the Armenian Genocide through transitional justice mechanisms, such as truth commissions, historical commissions, and parliamentary commissions, is crucial for confronting these historical injustices. However, given the strong denialism and authoritarian regime in Turkey, comprehensive reconciliation efforts face significant challenges. Persistent civil society mobilisation, grassroots activism, and international pressure are essential to advance these efforts. Engaging a wide range of actors, including civil society, scholars, and political parties, is vital for the legitimacy and effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms.

Nisan Alıcı

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 10. Emancipatory Space of the Political and Social Movements: Bodies, Meetings, and Street Protests

Abstract

On the occasion of the centenary of the Republic of Turkey, this chapter analyses the accumulation of political and social movements in Turkey and their relationship with the state apparatus. It mainly claims that the emancipatory space built up throughout the 2000s, along with its contentions, alliances, and discussions, may be scrutinised with the notion of encounter. I focus on the Kurdish movement, feminist and LGBTI+ movements and show how they built up this space embedded in a temporality of struggle, gathering, and alliance building. I further argue that there is a mutual relationship between the state apparatus and these movements and examine the relationality between what we call the state and the sounds coming from the streets.

Özgür Sevgi Göral

PDF Zum Volltext

Resistance of the Peoples

Frontmatter

Open Access

Chapter 11. Feminist Approaches to Sexual Morality in Turkey

Abstract

This chapter focuses on cisheteropatriarchal conceptions of “honour”, “morality”, and “decency” as a means to comprehend the historically evolving dominant discourses surrounding sexual morality and its correlation with feminist mobilisation in Turkey. The prevailing discourse on sexual morality has played a pivotal role in feminist campaigns and resistance for over a century, as it has been crucial in structuring social order and hierarchy, wherein cis-hetero-reproductive-marital sexuality was established as permissible, while non-marital active female and queer sexualities were consistently stigmatised and punished. Throughout Turkey’s evolving historical trajectory, the enduring struggle of women against the socio-cultural valorisation of honour has significantly shaped the intricate bond between feminism and sexuality. Despite the enduring perpetuation of sexual violence against women, queers, and trans individuals through the discourse of honour, I posit that this language was more prevalent in both popular and political discourses up until the 2010s, subsequently transitioning towards a discourse emphasising “common morals” or “decency” (genel ahlak), particularly with the burgeoning of queer and trans movements in Turkey. This paper aims to scrutinise this specific discursive shift through an examination of two significant feminist campaigns: “No to 438!” in 1990 and “The Istanbul Convention Saves Lives”, an ongoing political campaign since 2021.

Aslı Zengin

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 12. Traitors, Terrorists, & Çapulcus: Protests and the Limits of Democratic Politics in Turkey’s First Century and Beyond

Abstract

Despite their crucial role in the country’s political history, protests have not been normalised as a form of participation in Turkey. Neither state authorities nor much of the public consider or treat protests as legitimate and acceptable means of political expression or claims-making. This chapter examines the factors and historical circumstances contributing to this non-normalisation by presenting a brief (and thus unavoidably incomplete) account of the long and complex history of protests in Turkey. It treats this non-normalisation as a facet of one of the republic’s unresolved problems: its failure to constitute a form of democratic, civic citizenship. The chapter argues that protests are not seen as legitimate means of participation in contemporary Turkey due not only to their conflictual and violent history in the twentieth century but also to the boundaries of desirable behaviour for citizens—that is, to how an acceptable citizen is imagined. Within this history, this chapter highlights the Gezi protests of 2013 as a critical moment that revealed the possibility of democratic politics challenging dominant notions of citizenship and participation in Turkey. The chapter concludes with a brief assessment of the discourse on protests under the AKP regime’s populist authoritarian rule, which builds on historical legacies associating protests with illegality and anarchy.

T. Deniz Erkmen

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 13. Turkey’s Queer Struggle: Digital Media and Nightlife as the New Frontiers

Abstract

This chapter explores the convergence of the 100 + 1 anniversary of the Turkish Republic with the escalating repression of queer activism and the growing impact of digitalisation in everyday life. After providing a brief historical overview, the chapter primarily focuses on the events following the Gezi protests, which sparked heightened public interest in queer issues. Drawing from a literature review, this chapter illustrates how the increased public interest in queer issues after the Gezi protests has transformed the nature of queer activism. It explains how it has shifted from being predominantly centred in urban public spaces to a form of queer visibility that is primarily digital or digitally coordinated. The chapter also demonstrates that this transformation of queer activism from physical to digital spaces should not be idealised as a sign of new opportunities that digital media may offer to vulnerable and marginalised communities. While the queer movement increasingly uses digital media to raise awareness and establish transnational networks of solidarity, it has also facilitated the transnational mobilisation of anti-LGBTI+ politics, as evidenced by recent demonstrations organised by groups such as “concerned families” in Istanbul.

Yener Bayramoğlu

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 14. What Does It Mean to Win? Revisiting Environmental Movements in Turkey

Abstract

Environmental conflicts manifest across various scales and transcend temporal and spatial boundaries as societies seek new materials and energy sources to sustain growth-dependent economies. The increased visibility and politicisation of socio-environmental issues in Turkey have accentuated the dichotomy of winners and losers in these disputes. In this chapter, we offer a snapshot of environmental movements in the country with a focus on the idea of winning and losing. Despite historical tensions related to developmentalism, Erdoğan’s administration catalysed both the emergence and evolution of place-based environmental movements opposing state-backed energy and mining expansions. However, there is now a notable increase in environmental conflicts nationwide, coinciding with the erosion of legal safeguards for the non-human environment. While some of these movements achieved tangible successes in halting or altering environmentally destructive projects, others appear to have fallen short of their immediate goals. We argue that even seemingly unsuccessful movements can contribute significantly to a broader societal transformation. Thanks to these movements, environmental concerns, once relegated to the fringes of political debate, are now being more and more mainstreamed into oppositional politics, which face significant constraints. Our findings suggest the rise of antagonistic and intersectional environmental politics as a means of expressing broader societal dissent. Our hope here is to contribute to a deeper understanding of environmental activism and its political role in contemporary Turkey.

Cem İskender Aydın, Ethemcan Turhan

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 15. Urban Politics in the Republic of Exceptions: Politics of Informal Housing in Istanbul

Abstract

Exceptional modes of government that regularly violate fundamental rights have been one of the most durable characteristics of the Turkish Republic since its foundation. This chapter examines the governance of massive informal urbanisation that defined Turkey’s modernisation to explore the constitutive role of a different kind of politics of exceptions in the formation of state-society relations. It argues that the state’s use of legal exceptions to property and zoning laws has been central to its capacity to generate popular consent by turning legal transgressions into semi or full property ownership in discretionary, fragmented, and uneven ways. From the vantage point of property law, the Turkish state appears flexible and accommodating in its relations with the popular sectors in gecekondu neighbourhoods. Yet, notwithstanding its utmost importance for urban survival and social mobility, this modality of popular incorporation ultimately has reinforced the republic’s general failure to consolidate a rights-based egalitarian citizenship. The AKP’s politics of urban renewal appeared to mark a discontinuity with these entrenched patterns by undertaking a massive transfer of urban property to growth coalitions. Nevertheless, the surge of grassroots mobilisation in reaction to these projects and the regime’s subsequent attempts to govern these escalating tensions facilitated a new set of negotiations over the distribution of property in continuity with earlier patterns. Therefore, even when urban governance appears increasingly dispossessing, it has continued to maintain its flexibility in accommodating a diverse array of urban interests by relying on exceptions. The evidence for these arguments comes from fieldwork in three neighbourhoods in Istanbul involving semi-structured interviews with officials, activists, and community members; participant observation; and archival research.

Mert Arslanalp

PDF Zum Volltext

Structural Problems of the Republic

Frontmatter

Open Access

Chapter 16. Political Economy in Turkey: Between Continuity and Break

Abstract

Many scholars of Turkey’s contemporary political economy have observed the qualitative differences that characterise it—be it in the way that capital-state relations are forged, the shifts in the structural composition of the economy, or the predominance of financialisation. But it is the ascent of extractive sectors, such as construction, energy, and mining, that has been the hallmark of this era. These revamped venues of accumulation are marked with the explicit and visible role that the state assumed in their restructuring, as a series of critical changes in the legal infrastructure—ranging from market liberalisation measures to centralisation of policy-making—enabled their boom. This accumulation regime, coupled with the rolling-out of the World Bank-backed liberalisation of agriculture through the Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP), led to new forms of dispossession and proletarianisation. This chapter explicates the political economy of modern Turkey, with a focus on the regime of developmentalism mobilised within it, by the concept of accumulation by dislocation. In particular, it argues that a specific form of accumulation has gained prominence in contemporary Turkey, distinct in the interlinked flows of resources, capital, and labour that it mobilises, undergirded by an authoritarian turn. In doing so, the chapter draws particular attention to (i) the shifts in prevalent forms of labour in rural and urban settings, (ii) the changes in the use of land and space, (iii) spatial arrangements that accompany the process and aftermath of dispossession, and (iv) the changing nature of the state’s participation in accumulation processes.

Bengi Akbulut

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 17. Autocratisation Through Emergency Rule

Abstract

Turkey’s political transformation under AKP rule is often seen, for good reasons, as a prime example of gradual autocratisation. But the Turkish case also features sharp turning points, marked by extensive use of emergency powers, which provided a stepping stone for rapid autocratic change. In particular, both the episode of extralegal curfews in 2015 and the state of emergency that was declared a year later paved the way for a new and much more intense phase of autocratisation. This chapter explores Turkey’s political transformation through the conceptual lens of emergency rule. Such an approach points in two directions at once. On the one hand, it highlights something crucial about the specific modality of autocratic change over the past decade and, by extension, about the structure of the regime this modality tends to entrench. On the other hand, given the long pedigree of emergency powers in the political and legal history of the republic, it also allows us to elaborate on certain deep-rooted continuities, and work through the question of what is new in our present condition.

Serdar Tekin

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 18. Higher Education Reforms: A Century of State Interventions in Turkish Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter examines the impact on Turkish higher education of the forced “academic mobilities” that have occurred throughout the 100-year history of the republic. The central question is how recurrent purges and interventions in higher education have influenced both the concept and practice of universities in Turkey. The chapter also examines how authoritarian interventions in universities have been presented by the authorities as higher education reforms, even though many of these reforms have failed to improve the quality of the educational system, facilities, and scholarly production. It discusses how these reforms were used to exclude liberal, progressive, or dissident scholars who did not adhere to the mainstream ideology of the regime. Throughout, the chapter also discusses the core values of higher education, including critical scholarship, institutional autonomy, and academic freedom.

Olga Selin Hünler

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 19. The Military in Turkish Politics: The Centennial Balance Sheet and the Legacy for the Next Century

Abstract

The history of Turkey is an example in which the military exercised autonomous political power in the political sphere, occupying a central place in the institutional architecture of the state and holding various forms of legal, institutional, ideological, and economic power. Bringing the military under the control of civilian political authority has always been one of the main issues on the political agenda. The AKP government has brought the military under the control of civilian power since 2002 through a combination of legal reform and police-judiciary repression mechanisms. However, this brought neither democratic civilian control nor an end to militarist policies. This study examines the positioning of the military in politics and the state in the 100-year history of the republic within the framework of its sociopolitical dynamics, and points to the ongoing manifestations of militarism through new forms of politicisation in the military, the war industry, the militarisation of the Kurdish question and foreign policy, and ideological-cultural militarism as the republic enters its second century.

İsmet Akça

PDF Zum Volltext

Open Access

Chapter 20. Turkey–Russia Relations: Not an Alternative to the West but a Balancer

Abstract

This chapter summarises Turkey’s foreign policy in its first 100 years and presents the general dynamics of Turkey–Russia relations from 1923 to 2023, the breaking points that Turkey and Russia have experienced, and clues for the future of relations. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Tsardom in the First World War, two new countries emerged: Turkey and Russia. Relations between the two countries, which were in the process of being established, underwent a serious change when Russia took the form of the USSR. The system-level relations between the East, where the USSR was at the forefront, and the West, where Turkey belonged, also included divergences from the Cold War in parallel with Turkey’s status as a middle power. Therefore, the relations between the two countries deserve to be analysed separately under the umbrella of the Cold War. This chapter examines the factors, historical dynamics and continuities that have shaped Turkey–Russia relations over the past century, since the establishment of the republic.

Mühdan Sağlam

PDF Zum Volltext

Backmatter

PDF

Titel: The Republic of Turkey and its Unresolved Issues
herausgegeben von: Pınar Dinç
Olga Selin Hünler
Verlag: Springer Nature Singapore
Electronic ISBN: 978-981-9615-83-4
Print ISBN: 978-981-9615-82-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-1583-4